Earlier I wrote about how the Obamacare exchanges have failed to attract many young, healthy people — and how the early technical glitches have made the problem worse.

Of course, the older and sicker people who really needed health insurance coverage would have enrolled by hook or by crook — but in order to make all of this work economically, we need as many young, healthy adults as possible in order to prevent the adverse selection death spiral from making the exchanges unworkable.

In order to explain the problem of adverse selection in health insurance, it may be useful to use a different, simpler kind of insurance: homeowner’s insurance.

Suppose you haven’t had homeowner’s insurance for a number of years. Then all of a sudden your house catches on fire, and you have $100,000 in damage. If you walk into an insurance agent’s office the day after the fire and try to buy a policy that will pay for the repairs to your property after they have already occurred the agent will probably have a good laugh and explain why the insurance company would never, ever want to do that.

If there were a law, however, that said homeowner’s insurance companies have to accept all new applications, regardless of the condition of the home at the time of the application, restore the home to its original condition and charge these people the same premiums as everyone else, what do you suppose people might do?

Well, first of all, people whose homes were in good condition would naturally drop their insurance coverage since there would be no incentive whatsoever to keep paying premiums. If the insurer were required by law to accept any application, then people would wait until their houses caught on fire and then apply right after calling the fire department. Why not? And, of course, in order for the homeowner’s insurance company to stay afloat, the premiums would go up — dramatically.

Even if this were somehow workable, which it isn’t, if the fire damage were too extensive, the homeowner’s insurance company could declare the house a total loss and write the policyholder a check to buy a new house.

We sort of inherently understand and accept this in homeowner’s insurance because our home (or our car, boat, motorcycle, etc.) is a piece of property that has a dollar value on it and can be replaced. Plus, a fire at your home is largely an unpredictable event — the kind of event where an insurance market can function well. (Of course, there are some cases where people try to turn unpredictable events like fires into predictable events by deliberately causing them in order to cash in on a claim payout, but this can land them in prison for insurance fraud.)

Pre-existing conditions

But now let’s adapt that analogy back to health insurance. (Disclaimer: I’ve said for a long time that insurance is a really inappropriate paradigm for financing health care…but it’s the one we have in the United States.)

In health care, there are certainly unpredictable events like an accidental injury from playing basketball, but there are also a lot of predictable events. And these are the ones that can really add up like the house fire. If you’re recently diagnosed with cancer, you know in advance that you’re going to need a lot of expensive treatment in the near future. And if you’ve gone without insurance for a while, you might suddenly start to rethink that decision.

But for the insurance company, they don’t want anything to do with you at that point just like the homeowner’s insurance company doesn’t want anything to do with you after you’ve had a massive fire that needs to be repaired. So, just like the homeowner’s insurance agent denying the applicant whose house caught fire, the health insurer would deny that application on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

I wrote earlier that we understand and accept this in terms of homeowner’s insurance, but we feel quite differently when it comes to our health. Obviously for the person with cancer, financing their treatment could be a matter of life and death — and there’s no way to declare a person to be a total loss and just cash out their bodies. (At least not yet.)

On the surface, it may seem like the health insurer is just being greedy by denying this person’s application, but in reality the health insurer is trying to keep its premium rates down for all of the healthy people it has in the pool. If health insurers no longer had this option, then you would see the same kind of dramatic premium increases that you would see if homeowner’s insurance companies had to accept everyone who applied, even if their house had burned.

Finding a counterweight

And yet, we still don’t accept this from an ethical point of view. I know I don’t.

So if we require health insurers to accept everyone at the same premium rate regardless of health status — even someone just diagnosed with cancer — then we need a counterweight to make sure people don’t game the system and buy insurance even when they don’t need it. Along with the requirements for guaranteed issue (no denials for pre-existing conditions) and community rating (no rate increases based on pre-existing conditions), the Affordable Care Act has three counterweights.

First is the individual mandate. This is the part of the law that everybody hates because it’s basically the part of the law where we pay the price for all of the things we want — there is no free lunch. The second, and related counterweight, is an open enrollment deadline — the deadline for this year to avoid the tax penalty is March 31. Finally, there is 3:1 age banding that allows insurers to charge older people up to three times as much for premiums as younger people. (Insurers might prefer something closer to 10:1 age banding, but 3:1 is a lot less of a market distortion than no age banding at all.)

Check HealthCare.gov or your state exchange (where applicable) for yourself. If you compare the price of an unsubsidized health insurance policy with the tax penalty — especially this year — you will see that the penalty is much cheaper. Of course the price of a health insurance policy offered on the exchanges could be reduced dramatically if you qualify for income-based subsidies, but even then the penalty amount for not buying insurance is still relatively small. So many young, healthy people will opt to take their chances and pay the penalty instead of purchasing a policy…if they even realize that they have to make this decision.

If enrollment in the exchanges continues to skew older and sicker, then next year the premiums will inevitably rise higher…maybe much higher whereas the penalties are prescribed in the law without accounting for these actuarial changes. This may even accelerate the death spiral and render the law totally unworkable.

How this all plays out still remains to be seen, but if you’re a young, healthy adult without insurance, I’d like to ask you to at least shop around and see what you qualify for. You may be pleasantly surprised.